How Longevity Collaborate with your Health Professionals to get your Best Results
One of our most important values as a team here at Longevity is to collaborate. This is not only so that we work cohesively with other team members and practitioners, but it’s also so that we get the best results for our clients by combining everyone’s efforts together. Right now, we all need to work together as a community more than ever. Today, Longevity Exercise Physiology Drummoyne, Edgecliff, Marrickville, Bella Vista, Randwick, Pymble, Neutral Bay and Balmain explore the ways in which we collaborate with your health professionals to achieve the best possible outcomes for you.
Our core vision for our clients at Longevity is to impact the lifespan and quality of life of our community with personalised exercise prescription. Everyone’s health pathway is extremely varied and multi-faceted, with no same presentation across each individual. Thus, we must admit to you that we cannot do this alone. In order to deliver the best exercise prescription for you, we need to know about the other aspects of your health, work closely with other practitioners and make a concentrated effort towards not only your physical health, but also your social, emotional and environmental wellbeing as well. Below are just some of the ways we work with your other health practitioners to achieve the best results for you.
Doctors and surgeons
As Longevity Exercise Physiologists, we liaise with your doctors to ensure that we have the most accurate perspective on your health. Doctors will refer you to us when you have any condition or injury that could be improved from exercise. We provide exercise treatment to treat various medical conditions that your doctor has diagnosed including diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, chronic pain and osteoarthritis. We prescribe exercise for you like doctors do with medicine, giving you the right dosage and difficulty of exercise so that we can treat your condition or injury effectively.
There is no denying that medication is highly effective for many conditions, but they are not without side effects. This is where we also work together with doctors to minimise the side effects of many medications or taper you off a certain medication altogether. For example, if you are prescribed insulin from your doctor, it may put you at a higher risk gaining weight. Exercise will help manage your weight and when coupled with lifestyle changes, may be able to improve insulin function so that you can lower (or eventually eliminate) your insulin dosage.
Longevity Exercise Physiologists also have a key role in developing your physical functioning before and after surgeries. As such, we help surgeons maximise the health outcomes for their patients pre- and post-operation. For example, we prescribe exercise to improve the base level of functional lower body strength for a client prior to a hip replacement so that they will be at a better capacity post-surgery, as well as improving their transition post-surgery into normal everyday functional activity (e.g. walking and sitting).
Physiotherapists, Chiropractors and Osteopaths
We work closely with Physiotherapists, Chiropractors and Osteopaths to take care of clients during different phases of their health pathway. These practitioners would typically take care of the acute phase of a disease or injury (e.g. onset or flareup) for you, while we handle the sub-acute to chronic stages of the condition. We get a comprehensive history on how you have been during the earlier stages and make sure that we are all working towards the same end goals for your health. As EPs, we have the skills to work with various diagnoses from your therapists, and in many cases we can improve your health outcomes without a formal diagnosis at all.
Clients can also undergo concurrent manual therapy treatment and EP treatment, which can be highly advantageous for many conditions. In these cases, we as EPs coordinate our exercise prescription alongside the manual therapists’ treatment so that we all work together cohesively towards your health goals with a strong understanding of your broader health picture.
Dieticians and nutritionists
We all know that exercise and diet are like a car and its fuel. For many conditions such as diabetes, obesity, hypertension, liver disease, high cholesterol and osteoporosis, it won’t matter how great your exercise prescription is—if you have a poor diet, it will be quite hard to get good health outcomes. The same is also true the other way around. We have established great relationships with dieticians and nutritionists to coordinate a healthcare plan that factors in both our clients’ physical activity and their food intake. It also allows us to factor in the effects of a diet plan on a patient’s body and how our exercise programmes will need to adjust accordingly.
Psychologists
Mental health and exercise have a very close relationship together both in the way where exercise can improve mood, cognitive function, reduce anxiety and depression through stimulation of neurochemicals. It can also work in the opposite way where it can be very hard to find motivation or be in the right mood for physical activity as a result. Many of us are facing hard times right now during the COVID pandemic and as a result, a lot of people have suffered with their mental health.
Thus, we work closely with psychologists to help guide their clients with exercise to treat their mental health, while also liaising with them to ensure that are receiving the right help for their psychological and emotional wellbeing at the same time.
Here at Longevity, we are all about working together and fostering a community
Here at Longevity, we are all about working together and fostering a community. We ensure that you are supported by an entire team and always have a network of practitioners around you for help. We understand that your health is complex and that we are just one aspect of it, so we are here to make it easier for you.
Reach out to us on 1300 964 002 to find out how we can help you with your health during the pandemic.
Written by Jackie Cheung
